The Walking Dead showrunner on creating Alpha’s unique look

SPOILER ALERT: Read on only if you have already watched Sunday’s “Omega” episode of The Walking Dead.

We already knew that Alpha looked disturbing in her zombie-skin mask. As to how she looks now without the mask, we just got our first gander at the very end of Sunday’s “Omega” episode of The Walking Dead, and it turns out… also pretty disturbing!

We asked showrunner Angela Kang about how they came up with Alpha’s striking look, and also delved deep into the flashback-heavy episode that gave us backstories for both Alpha and her daughter, Lydia. We learned that the duo were trapped in Baltimore with Lydia’s dad when the apocalypse hit. But when others started panicking, Alpha took charge — killing some poor dude named Ortiz for freaking out, and then taking out her own husband when he wouldn’t let them leave once the going got bad.

Kang explains why they decided to give Alpha and Lydia a rare backstory episode, gets into what their big reunion at the end means, and even drops a tasty clue as to what to expect from the Whisperers coming up. (Read through both pages for the entire interview, and also check out our episode Q&A with Alpha herself, Samantha Morton.)

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: A big backstory episode here as we learn the origins of Alpha and what happened to her and Lydia at the start of the apocalypse. Why don’t you just start by telling me what you all wanted to achieve here by showing this, because it is pretty rare when you all do this for characters. Usually we just meet them in the present and they may tell us about their past, but that’s about it. Obviously, you went much deeper here with Alpha.

ANGELA KANG: Yeah, we tend to keep the show rooted radically in the present. We rarely do flashbacks, but I think the thing that became intriguing to us is we were just asking ourselves a lot of questions about it. Because, of course, all of us love the story of the Whisperers in the comic books. It’s something I’ve been looking forward to because these issues were coming out as I was working on the show. I was like: Oh my God. This is so crazy, I’d love to dive into it.

But as we were working on the stories, we’re like, what kind of a person decides that the way to go through life is to put on the skin of dead people and then gathers people around them to do the same? And what is that psychology? What kind of things are in that person? Who were they before the apocalypse? As we were talking about it, we just felt like: Oh, man, we have Samantha Morton, who’s this incredible, incredible actor. It would be fun to kind of show a little bit of who this person was, and to also show that unlike some of our other characters who maybe were trying to kind of be good for a long time in the apocalypse and before they became a “villain” — maybe there was something always a little broken in her.

What about the Lydia side of the story?

With Lydia, it really felt like, what is her goal there? What is she trying to do? We felt that she would be lying to try to get information, but also, she’s a kid, and what are the effects of being in this strange relationship with her mother been like? We thought that Alpha might have filled her head with a lot of nonsense about the way the world is. Part of that is true too, kind of like the comic. It’s surprising to her to see that the world is a different place than she maybe thought it was.

In order to do that, it really made sense for us to tell this flashback story, except it’s an unreliable narrator story too, because Lydia is realizing that her own memories about her mother, and her parents, and what it means to be in the world may be scrambled because she’s this victim of this very emotionally abusive and physically abusive relationship. So it sort of kind of came organically out of the conversations that we had and our own questions. We thought it’s so interesting to us to try to answer these questions that maybe it would be interesting to the audience too, so we decided to take a swing at it.

You have this situation where not only does Lydia finally open up in this episode, but we get a few different references to the physical beatings Daryl took, and those end up forging connections between him and Lydia, and him and Henry as well. So it’s really this interesting dance here where all three characters are trying to build trust with each other at the same time.

Yeah, I think Norman [Reedus] plays all the stuff related to that character’s abuse so well, just all the complexities of that. That Lydia has the upbringing that she has, we just immediately kind of jumped to Daryl as such an interesting character to cross with her because he has had a horrible childhood. He’s kind of risen above it in so many ways, even though there are still parts of himself that he struggles with. We thought that that was a really interesting opportunity to tell stories with people who have such trauma in their lives and are just trying to cope with it as they move forward in this apocalypse.

Henry really is the one that’s outside of that in some ways, but trying to empathize. He’s had a very lovely childhood. Obviously, fraught with loss, but has had loving, supportive people raising him, which is just a completely different kind of background for him. He has such sympathy though and empathy for these people who weren’t as lucky as him in that way. That’s been really fun for us to write too.

Lydia picks up that hammer and is ready to escape, but then hears a baby crying and puts it down. What is it about that baby crying that flips a switch in her?

Here’s what I’ll say: We’ll find out a lot more about the Whisperers and babies very soon. There’s an aspect related to the culture of their society that’s probably running through her mind. But I also think for somebody who’s been told the world is over, there’s no such things like communities behind walls that are safe and where people can live — all of that’s a lie, all of it will fall apart always. To be in a place that is clearly thriving, where they have crops, where people have homes, where people can have families, and the baby cries, and the baby is safe, these are all things that are just breaking every sort of truth that she believed that she knew about the world. So it’s like the hopefulness of being able to raise children in a post-apocalyptic world — I do think that there is something to that for a lot of our characters.

Lydia spent her entire childhood that she really remembers in the apocalypse, and that’s an emotional thing to think, like, “I’ve been wandering around outside the walls, wearing this skin of a dead monster, and here’s this baby that just is safe behind walls, loved by somebody, taken care of by a community.” That’s something that’s a triggering moment for her. We thought that that was an interesting way to simply dramatize that moment, but there’s also something very specific about babies, and the way that they deal with babies, that we’ll learn about in the next episode. (Interview continues on next page.)

NEXT PAGE: Kang explains Alpha’s new look and what’s coming up next

AMC’s zombie thriller, based on the classic comic book serial created by Robert Kirkman.